This blog contains fiction, non-fiction, articles and essays, some of which have appeared in newspapers and periodicals around the world.
To see titles of all posts, simply click on the dates in which they were posted, to the right.

Tuesday, August 1, 2017

Duck Shoot

Tel el
Kebir, known to the British troops in Egypt in the 1950s as Tek, a sprawling
mass of sheds and tents shimmering in the heat, rose out of the desert as the
jeeps came over the crest of the hill. The sentry recognized Lieutenant Pete Roberts,
saluted, and waved him through the camp’s main gate. Roberts looked up at a
nearby searchlight tower where, up on its platform, a bored Mauritian soldier
scanned a part of the camp’s 17 mile barbed-wired, mined perimeter with
binoculars. Another, stripped to the waist, his black body glistening with
sweat, languidly polished the searchlight’s reflector.

Driving the
leading jeep, Roberts heard the soldier behind him unclick his weapon’s
magazine as they raced down the tarmac strip into the center of the camp,
incongruously signposted Oxford Street.
He swung his vehicle onto a rough track, at the end of which another sign read PDF,
which stood for Perimeter Defense Force.

Roberts
turned onto the uneven rock-hard sand vehicle park behind the building that
housed the battalion’s headquarters. It was quiet in the yard. Most of the unit
slept in the afternoon, since all the patrols and ambush teams that watched
over the perimeter operated at night. In the park a lone mechanic, dressed in
greasy shorts and canvas shoes, lay on his back in the dust under another jeep.
At the armory, the store man, clearly half awake, leaned on the counter behind
the closed lower half of the stable-like door, and jerked to attention when
Roberts put down his revolver.

“Hey!”

“Sorry, sir,
I’d just dropped off for a moment.”

Roberts
lowered his voice, so as not to be heard by his crew waiting in line behind
him.

“It’s not
good enough, Banks. I know it’s bloody hot, but I ought to charge you for
sleeping on duty. You know that, don’t you?”

The man
nodded. “Yes, sir.”

“Well, watch
it.”

Roberts handed
over his revolver. “Clean this, will you? I’ve just used it.”

He thought
again of the injured dog that had leaped in front of the jeep an hour earlier
in Tek village. Crazed with pain, it had spun around in the hot road. A few
villagers, sitting at coffee tables under a jacaranda tree at the curb, jeered
and threw stones at the animal that was dragging itself toward the canal,
trailing its crushed leg. Roberts leaned out of the jeep, took hasty aim at the
dog from about twenty feet and squeezed the trigger. But he’d only wounded it.
Now the locals mocked the English officer, catcalling and shouting to their
mates in the village street.

For the
dog’s sake, but also to save face, he was determined to finish off the animal.
He scrambled out of the vehicle, and walked a few paces back to it. The
villagers were closing in a little and Roberts, glancing back, was relieved to
see that his armed men in both vehicles were covering him.

A young
Egyptian dressed in grubby khaki with neither hat nor shoes, had moved between
Roberts and the agonized animal, making a sneering pretense of shielding it.

“Don’t kill the dog, mister, please
don’t kill it!”

He called to the excited crowd and
they closed in, quieter now, watching intently. The dog lay maybe a yard to the
right and a little farther back from the youth’s feet, and the men all but
touched Roberts when he took a few quick paces forward and shot the dog dead. A
roar went up from the crowd of villagers, and then they quietened down and
scattered, keeping a wary distance from the jeeps.

Roberts
walked back to the jeep and his watchful escorts at a deliberately casual pace,
revved the engine to an angry roar, and drove away.

Roberts looked
into the officer’s mess on his way to his tent. Inside, Mike Drayton, Bravo
Company commander, was sprawled in an armchair dozing under a whirring ceiling
fan, with an empty beer glass on the table beside him. He looked up when
Roberts came in.

“Hello,
Pete. Everything OK?”

Roberts
decided not to mention the dog because Drayton, known to be a tartar when he
wanted, might well have given him an earful for putting himself and his men at
risk.

“No
problems, sir.”

“How are
your men handling this heat?” Drayton asked.

“They swear
about it, but they can take it. The temperature out there’s a hundred and
twenty-two.”

“Like a
beer?” Drayton asked.

“No thanks.
I’m going to get some shut-eye for an hour or two.”

“Good idea.
By the way, I’m putting a new man on your patrol tonight. He’s a National
Service kid called Cash, straight out of officer cadet school back home. Don’t
scare the poor little bugger too much on his first time out.”

Roberts
grinned. “We’ll try not to.”

Outside the
mess hut, he realized how tired he was. In his tent a cheap tin alarm clock
ticked away the afternoon. He sat on the end of his bed and slowly unwound his
puttees. The black shining leather where they’d been made a tidemark against
the dusty uppers of his boots Then he undressed, lit a cigarette and sat naked
on the bed, winding the clock.

“Boy, you
get more alluring every day we’re out here!”

Chris
Pollard’s face emerged from under the mosquito net on the other bed. “And you’re
smoking too much. Know that?”

“No thanks.
I appreciate it, but I’ll be fine after a couple of hours kip.”

Pollard had
gone when Robert’s batman woke him at five, with a mug of tea and a canvas
bucket of hot water. He shaved in the tent and then showered outside under a galvanized
iron tank perched on stilts in the sun. The air was a little cooler outside
now. He dressed in a fresh set of khaki drill. In the compound near the mess
four jeeps stood in a row, each with a Bren machine gun and a spotlight on the
hood.

The
officers’ mess was almost empty at six, since everyone who wasn’t on perimeter
patrol normally dined an hour or two later. Major Drayton, captain Hugh Lunt –
his second-in-command – and two subalterns were already at the table when
Roberts sat down. Cash, the new arrival, had been seated between Drayton and
Lunt.

Roberts
leaned across the table and shook his hand.

“You must be
Cash. Welcome to Tek.”

Cash was
slightly built, with a white, vulnerable face and close-cut ginger hair. He
seemed a few years older than most of the National Service officers who came
out to serve their eighteen-month stint with the regiment.

“Where are you
from?” Roberts asked.

“Bristol,
but I’ve been in London for the last four years getting my degree.”

“Where?”

“Slade,”
Cash said.

“So, you’re an artist?”

The young
man smiled. “One day, maybe. But I’m not sure a BA in Art’s going to be
relevant for the next year or so.“

While they
ate, Max Barstow, another subaltern who made a habit of intimidating young
newcomers, and who was one of the least liked officers in the regiment, turned
to the new arrival and said, “Done any duck shooting, Cash?”

The
newcomer faced Barstow. “No, why?”

“Shooting
ducks is better experience for this place than painting pretty pictures.”

Major
Drayton glanced at his watch. “That’s enough,
Max. Gentlemen. Let’s . . . well . . .let’s go shoot a few ducks. I want you
and your men in your vehicles out there and ready in ten minutes.”

It was
getting dark. Roberts, at the wheel of the jeep with Cash beside him, led a
column of six vehicles.

“So, what’s
the routine?” Cash asked.

“Same old
thing. As always, the mission’s to keep these brown bastards from creeping in
and stealing our stuff. We take each team to its start point a few hundred
yards back from the perimeter. They leave their trucks there and manhandle
their weapons and gear up to the wire on their flat feet in the dark. If
they’re quiet about it, anyone breaking in will find it harder to know where we
are.”

“What
then?”

“Then you
and I cruise the seventeen-mile perimeter a few hundred yards back from the
wire. From time to time I’ll accelerate and speed up to the points where no PDF
team’s lying there, the dark spots between the searchlight towers. At the same
time, I want you to sweep the area with your spot lamp, and if we find anyone
sneaking through we shoot ‘em. Of course, if we’re near enough to one of our teams
that puts up a parachute flare and starts shooting, we’ll go in and give ‘em
some extra fire power.”

After a
year of perimeter patrols, all this was routine for Roberts. He remembered his
own fervor in the first weeks and months out here. It may not have been the
action he’d hoped for in terrorist hotspots such as Malaya and Kenya, but it
was as close as he could get to real action for now. After getting what his
fellow cadets at Sandhurst had jokingly called “a degree in killing people,”
he’d relished the promise of putting his training into practice. But for Cash,
it must be starkly different. This just wasn’t his thing. He was fresh from the
secure routine of his art school in London. How would he react to what happened
out here?

Cash had
been reticent and diffident in the mess room, but now, as they drove out to the
perimeter, with the radio operator and his gear wedged in the narrow seat
behind them, he seemed far more self-confident.

“I met a
bloke in Port Said yesterday,” Cash said. ‘He said the stuff behind the barbed
wire in here’s worth millions of pounds. Is that true?”

“Absolutely.
It must be the one the biggest army supply places in the world – hundreds of
acres of small arms, ammunition, radio, telephone equipment, vehicle parts,
tanks, trucks. You name it, and it’s probably here. The wogs come in looking
for things they can carry away, especially weapons and ammo. And would you
believe they pinch tons of blankets? They get a good price in the street
markets. Fancy risking your life for a few bloody blankets!”

Cash didn’t
reply for a moment. “But then, they’re as poor as anything, aren’t they?” he
said. “I mean, it’s pathetic. They’re on their uppers. They live in little mud
houses . . .hovels, really. I saw a lot of people when we were on the train coming
down to Ismailiyah today, out there in the fields. The fellahin. Most of them have arms and legs like scarecrows. Mustn’t
there be something wrong with their society if they have to risk being killed
for a few blankets? And they must have a lot of guts, too. You can’t help being
sorry for them.”

Roberts was
taken aback. Something wrong with their society? Guts? What sort of talk was
this? It was lucky the radio operator was busy netting-in with his headset on
to hear him. He couldn’t believe it. Here was a newly commissioned officer
fresh out from home, trying to justify the sins of their enemy. But then, he
was an artist, wasn’t he? He was probably a damn poet, too. Arty people tended
to be like this, radicals, a bit left of center. He’d pronounced fellahin like a bloody Arab. Where had
he learnt that?

Now he had a very different view of the
bastards. Not long ago they were crawling through the wire and over the mines
and blowing up trucks, burning down the storage sheds and sniping at the
searchlights. And he just couldn’t get this morning’s incident with the dog out
of his mind. That was what these people were really like. They loafed in the
streets, spat at the soldiers whenever they were stuck in traffic. They stole
from strangers, and even from each other. And guts? Forget it. They had as much
courage as the pye-dogs slinking in the village streets.

“Listen,
Cash,” Roberts said. “You’re entitled to your views, but if I were you I
wouldn’t air them to your colleagues. It won’t go down well.”

Chastened,
Cash didn’t say anything, but occupied himself with loading the Bren gun that
lay in front of him on sandbags on the jeep’s hood, and connecting up the leads
of the spot lamp on his lap. Minutes later, the two arrived at the first team’s
start point.

As in the
other four teams, there were four privates and a non-commissioned officer,
equipped with two medium machine-guns, three rifles with sniping sights, a spot
lamp, a two-inch mortar for parachute flares, an Alsatian killer-dog and its
handler.

The men
didn’t like the dogs. Too many had seen them tear out the throat of an intruder
in a few seconds. They tended to snuffle in the dark, giving away their
positions to the intruders. There was also a prevalent belief that, after
killing their real prey, they’d sometimes come padding back and attack the
team.

Roberts and
Cash watched as the men, laden down with their weapons, ammunition and heavy
spot lamp batteries, set out on foot for the perimeter fence, and fading into
the dark. An hour later, with their lights and engine off, the two officers
were parked in the shadows. Across the sand from the Nile Delta drifted the
constant barking of village dogs and the throb of a water pump among the palm
trees, like a giant human pulse. Half a mile away a searchlight beam swept
languidly to and fro across the desert, like a lighthouse on some dangerous
coastline.

Another
hour passed uneventfully. From time to time they sped to a new position, while
Cash, behind his gun, raked the sand across the wire with the spot lamp. The
night dragged on, each successive hour longer than the one before. After
midnight, a brilliant half-moon rose on the horizon, and it grew colder. With
the vehicle parked again, Roberts shivered suddenly, and felt the telltale
drooping of his eyelids. Next to him the new man, was wide awake, and sitting
bolt upright, watching the moonlit wire through glasses. He’d been as keen
himself once, he thought. But now, it was dull routine, with two incidents a
month at most.

Roberts
glanced at his watch. Three-thirty. It seemed it was going to be a quiet night.

But a few
minutes later, Cash turned to Roberts.

“Listen!
What’s going on over there?”

There were
raised voices, and then shouts from a nearby observation tower. The searchlight
had stopped sweeping, and now concentrated its beam on a point maybe fifty
yards beyond the outer ring of the wire. One of the Mauritians was scanning the
illuminated area with binoculars.

“They’re
onto something all right,” Roberts said.

The men on
the tower had swung the beam away for a few seconds and then quickly back to
the same spot, hoping for a change of shape – something to identify, maybe
someone running.

“Let’s get
over there,” Roberts said. He ground the jeep into gear and drove the hundred
or so yards to the foot of the tower and, cupping his hands, called up to the
men on the platform.

“What’s
going on out here?”

Nobody
answered, but seconds later there was a rifle shot, and then another, and a
third. The shots echoed from the Delta and then, from the platform above, came
a burst of convulsed laughter.

“Hey! I
said what’s going on?”

A head
appeared over the railing.

“Who you?”

“The PDF
officer. What happened?”

“We shoot
him, sir.”

“Who did
you shoot?”

“A fox, a
big one.”

They were
back in the shadows again

“Are there
a lot of foxes here?” Cash asked.

“Quite a
few, but I doubt it was a fox. More likely a damn pye-dog.”

The young
officer was silent again, and neither spoke for four or five minutes.

“Aren’t we
going to get any action tonight?” he asked later.

Roberts was
leaning back in his seat, gazing up into the sky at a moon that was almost
dazzling, and a million brilliant stars.

“I wouldn’t
say that,” he said. There’s another hour or two before sunrise. A lot can
happen in a couple of hours.”

The
faintest glimmer of dawn appeared on the horizon. Roberts glanced at his watch.
In an hour or two, he thought, they’d be back in their tent lines, sleeping off
another uneventful night on the perimeter.

A few
minutes passed, and then two short bursts of machine-gun fire broke the
silence.

“Well,
Cash,” Roberts said, “you wanted action. Here it comes.”

He started
the engine and they raced northeast up the perimeter road. As they sped past
one of the first observation towers, the crew on the platform pointed excitedly
toward the next one. But oddly, as they came over the crest of the next slope,
there was no sweeping searchlight beam at the top of the tower. Roberts stopped
under the platform and yelled up to the men on the railing.

“What’s
wrong with your searchlight?”

A Mauritian
leaned over the railing. He spoke almost unhurriedly, as though there was no
need for urgency.

“They shot
it, sir. Right out! There were four of them and we’ve killed one.”

“Which way
did they go?” Roberts asked.

“Toward the
Delta, I think. They have not gone very far. They went back very carefully
through the minefield. I think we hit at least one.”

They
needn’t have bothered, Roberts thought. The mines, an unreliable and long
obsolete early 1940s model, had been there in the heat for a decade or more,
and they rarely detonated. Their value was now mainly psychological.

Roberts
knew the quick way out to the Delta. Several small, locked, heavily-wired
wooden gates, known as Q-gates, were installed around the perimeter. These
allowed PDF patrols to drive out into the desert through a ten-foot wide
mine-free channel, and each was positioned in full view of a searchlight tower.

“You got a
Q-gate here?” he called up.

“Oh yes,
sir. I will drop the keys down to you.”

The ring of
keys pattered down, and minutes later Cash had unlocked the gate and they were
through the fence. Although the sun had partly broken the horizon, it was much
lighter now, but the dark belt of palm trees in the Delta prevented the fleeing
men from being silhouetted against what little light there was. For a few
uncertain seconds the patrol circled and peered around themselves.

Soon they
were no more than a quarter of a mile from the trees.

“Look!
We’ve got ‘em.”

The
three men, one of whom had a rifle, were making for the cover of the trees in
Indian file, and the man in the middle was dragging his leg. He was clearly
wounded, and his companions seemed to have slowed down somewhat so that he
could keep up. Roberts veered toward them and, following regulations, he called
out his only word of Arabic, ordering the men to stop.

“Stanna!”

But the men
kept running, stumbling on toward the trees.

And now, to
Roberts’ astonishment, Cash called the second warning, adding a few other words
in Arabic. They sounded curt, peremptory. Immediately, the armed man at the
rear stopped running and spun toward them. But he wasn’t raising his hands in
surrender. He’d dropped on one knee and was taking aim.

Quickly,
Roberts barked a third warning when simultaneously, a bullet struck the jeep’s
radiator with a ringing metallic clang.

Roberts saw
a jet of water spurt to the left from the pierced hood.

“Kill the
bastards!”

To Roberts’
annoyance, even though the man with the rifle would shoot at any moment, Cash
held his fire for a few more seconds, and instead yelled one last sentence at
the Egyptians. His voice was hoarse, passionate. Roberts recognized only one
word. Allah.

Cash, who
was already leaning into the butt of the Bren gun, flicked the control lever to
automatic, took aim and opened fire. In a few seconds, at about forty yards,
he’d felled the armed man with a quick, well-controlled burst, jerking him off
balance so that he seemed to toss away his rifle, falling spread-eagled on his
back. The man in front had stopped and turned, throwing his arms around his
limping comrade. Then, in one long burst of fire that caused a juddering
vibration in the vehicle, Cash swept the gun from left to right and back again,
until the magazine was empty, and all three men lay dead on the sand.

Roberts and
Cash sat still, and neither spoke. The radio operator, his face white with
shock, was calling for an ambulance. Not far away, from a dozen minarets behind
the trees, came a plaintive call to prayer.

A dazzling
sun rose over the Delta. Roberts turned back to the radio operator to whom –
though he’d been there with them for eleven hours – neither officer had spoken
except to give the occasional order.

“What’s
going on back there?”

“They’ll
have the ambulance here soon as they can, sir.”

For the
first time, Roberts looked into the soldier’s baby face. He didn’t look a day
over sixteen. Like Cash, he was probably fresh out from home.

“So, what
did you think of that little action, signaler?”

The young
soldier grinned. “Me, sir? I was friggin’ scared . . .I don’t mind tellin’ ya.’
I thought that little wog was goin’ to do us all in.”

Though it
was only seven-thirty, the temperature must already have been in the upper
eighties.

“How’d you
feel?” Roberts asked Cash, who’d still said nothing since the incident.

“I’m all
right,” he said, but his voice was lifeless and he was shaking uncontrollably,
as though he was chilled with cold.

Roberts had
been puzzled by Cash’s apparent fluency in Arabic. What an odd fish he was!

About Me

Hello, and welcome to my blog. It's a growing collection, currently of about 60 short stories, feature articles, memoirs, essays and some verse. Many of these have appeared in newspapers and magazines on both sides of the Atlantic and South East Asia, and i hope the blog will give them a wider audience.

IF YOU CLICK ON THE DATES ON THE RIGHT OF THE PAGE, YOU’LL SEE WHAT STORIES WERE POSTED HERE IN THE PAST FEW YEARS.

I'm British-born, live in New York City, educated at Cranbrook school and the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst. I was an infantry officer in the British Army and afterwards worked for many years at major American, Australian and UK public relations firms. I've traveled and handled assignments in more than 30 countries.